Task-oriented dialog systems have been applied in various tasks, such as automated personal assistants, customer service providers and tutors. These systems work well when users have clear and explicit intentions that are well-aligned to the systems' capabilities. However, they fail if users intentions are not explicit. To address this shortcoming, we propose a framework to interleave non-task content (i.e. everyday social conversation) into task conversations. When the task content fails, the system can still keep the user engaged with the non-task content. We trained a policy using reinforcement learning algorithms to promote long-turn conversation coherence and consistency, so that the system can have smooth transitions between task and non-task content. To test the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we developed a movie promotion dialog system. Experiments with human users indicate that a system that interleaves social and task content achieves a better task success rate and is also rated as more engaging compared to a pure task-oriented system.

本文提出了一种基于交替任务导向的社交对话框架，该框架使用强化学习算法训练策略，以维持长时间的会话连贯性和一致性，使系统能够在任务和非任务内容之间实现平滑的过渡。实验表明，将社交对话内容与任务对话相结合的系统比纯任务导向的系统具有更好的任务成功率和更高的用户参与度。

交替任务和非任务内容的对话系统学习